Monday, May 30, 2011

Can you become more intelligent?

You know, I hate when someone says: "I hate math and will never get it". I also hate that I used to think I could never memorize history chapters. I had to learn the hard way, the right method to learn something. Sadly, not all people get to do that, and of course it depends on the subject.

Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn't have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth.

You know the tricks, some people write things down, some people read out loud, some people have to re-solve all math exercises, other give a name for every letter in a very complicated disease name, some people make a song out of a paragraph, or some (like me) read something and sleep on it, my own explanation is "khalliyoun yetkhamaro", so on and so forth

One of my first clients was a little boy w/ PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Delays-Not Otherwise Specified), a mild form of autism. When we began therapy, his IQ was tested and scored in the low 80s —which is considered borderline mental retardation. After I worked with him for about three years [..] he was retested. His IQ score was well over 100

I stumbled upon this link "You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential". And I wasn't surprised or shocked to know this truth, because it happened with me. I remember increase my IQ by 17 points. I did that by learning the tricks on those IQ tests. I learned to skim through articles and read "the important", I learned that (only when I want to), summarize what I am reading by the main idea of each paragraph, I learned to focus, another thing I learned was "repeating" to someone what I read, and then BAM, it moves from your short term memory, to your long term memory. Best way is to read something over several days, really does sneak and spread through your neurons.

So this article talks about Multimodal Teaching (using as many modes of input as possible). The author's point and my point as well, is that there is always a way to understand something, but understanding isn't enough, remembering is more important, and there is also several methods to accomplish that. Now this article is pretty interesting for educators, and I believe presenters of any kind of information to any audience.

This sort of also remind me of the movie Limitless. We have a brain, but we don't fully use it. How do we know this? I don't want to get scientific here, I just want you to imagine when we have a deadline, how our brains transform from a serpent to a dolphin's.

There is also a link to an interesting paper about this whole Multimodal Teaching, consider reading it if you want your head to grow a bit bigger, shou Megamind a7san?